Linda Lê is an extraordinary writer of scintillating French prose. Born in South Vietnam in 1963, she came to Paris as an adolescent and is now Vietnamese in the same way that Nabokov was Russian, writing in her adopted language with a kind of desolate grace.

Los Angeles Times
Linda Lê

Linda Lê

Linda Lê was born in Dalat, South Vietnam in 1963, and moved to France with her mother, grandmother, and three sisters in 1977. She received the Fénéon Prize in 1998, and most recently the Prix Wepler in 2010. She has had two books published in English, Slander (University of Nebraska Press, 1996), and The Three Fates (New Directions, 2009).

cover image of the book The Three Fates

The Three Fates

by Linda Lê

Translated by Mark Polizzotti

The three fates – now three Vietnamese “princesses” in France – were spirited away as little children by their powerful grandmother when Saigon fell to the communists. Now the two sisters and their cousin await the arrival of their father and uncle, still marooned in his little blue house in the old country. “Leave King Lear alone, I’d told my cousins,” our principal narrator (an intellectual who has lost a hand) informs us: “They had neglected him for twenty years and now they were conspiring like a pair of Cordelias to bestow one last joy on the old monarch: he hadn’t asked for it.” From a luxurious home in the French countryside, his two daughters (the elder, very pregnant and restlessly cooking and eating, kept company by her long-legged and icy younger sister) plot to drag their father halfway around the world – away from his poverty and from his only friend and the grilled eels they happily devour together – to flaunt their success. Scathingly unsentimental, The Three Fates transposes Shakesperean tragedy into a contemporary idiom and a decidedly different culture. A sharply vivacious book about “the bitch of fate,” The Three Fates – like a witches’ pot on the boil – brews up from displaced lives a darkly funny and agitated concatenation.

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Linda Lê is an extraordinary writer of scintillating French prose. Born in South Vietnam in 1963, she came to Paris as an adolescent and is now Vietnamese in the same way that Nabokov was Russian, writing in her adopted language with a kind of desolate grace.

Los Angeles Times
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